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Tips To Improve Your Rankings with Topic-Focused SEO Strategy

Keywords hold great value for SEO. This is the reason that SEO professionals are quite concerned about the keyword research they do. But times have changed now. A few years back, keyword-focused strategy may have been effective but now the search engines use updated algorithms that primarily focus on what users want. This is the reason that focusing on topics instead of keywords may be the best approach.

Difference between topics and keywords

You may wonder what the difference between a topic and a keyword is. In simple words, we can describe topic as a more holistic way of approaching keyword research. You can describe a topic as a combination of difference terms which may be used at different phases during a buyer’s journey. And that makes it pretty easy for you to create content because you will know well about the type of content required based on what the topic is demanding.

Start with a strategy

While you are building your site or rethinking its structure, you are going to have to step back and develop a strategy for the topics that you need to focus on. For this purpose, you will first have to look at the broader perspective of your offerings. This way, you will be able identify the topics that you need to cover.

The best thing that can happen as a result of this approach is that you can get ideas about more semantically relevant terms related to the topic.

Research your competitors

After you have understood what content you are going to need to develop, now you have to look within the industry to find out who ranks well with that type of content. The reason they are ranking well means they are doing something right. If you want to stand out, you will have to keep this competition in focus.

After you have analyzed the competition, you will have to run the competitors’ site through a tool to see how well they are performing against certain terms over a period of time. This will give you an idea about what your competitors are doing. Now look at the structure of their content which is ranking.

Intent

Search engines have become smarter enough to know what a user is searching for. They have been basically programmed to identify the user intent. It means that if you want your content to rank well, you are going to have to focus on the user intent instead of just keywords.

While you can use many tools to get a list of search phrases, there is another way you can find search intent behind a query. You can simply search in incognito or private windows of web browsers.

You will be surprised. You will just enter the basic keyword, and the results are going to be more educational.

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Important SEO Trends to Focus In 2020

At the end of every year, it is important to look into the future prospects, especially when you are running a business. Doing SEO of your company’s or your website is nothing less than a serious business which demands good allocation of resources and a nice strategy in order to be successful. In this article, we are going to talk about the SEO trends which you are going to have to focus in 2020.

BERT and user-focused optimization

BERT algorithm by Google has got great bit of attention from the SEO professionals because it is an algorithm which is mainly tasked with improving search experience of the users. So, the best way to optimize for BERT is to not keep BERT in primary focus. Since it is all about users now, the SEO professionals have to make sure that their SEO efforts are focused on entertaining users more than ever.

The main areas of focus in this regard surely involve keyword optimization as the first thing. You have to make sure that you are focusing user intent while doing on-page optimization of your site. And then, it is all about the content that you are creating. Make sure that your content is of highest value for the users.

High quality, optimized content

SEO is all about the content that you create. It is the content that has to be showcased well. Everything that you do with your site in terms of SEO tends to bring people to your content. And so, you have to make sure that it is convincing enough to turn your visitors into the site users.After you have worked well on the topic research, make sure that you are creating only high quality content around those topics.

One important thing in this regard is that you have to do an extensive research to find the right audience that you want to target. If you are promoting your content in front of the people who have nothing to do with what you are offering, you are simply wasting your time and resources.

E-A-T

There has been a lot of discussion about E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) in the recent years. And this discussion is going to continue in 2020. As a matter of fact, these factors are going to be even more important in the years to come. Great level of expertise is required for the website SEO. It means that you have to make sure that you are creating high quality content only. And authoritativeness is all about the way you show off what you are promoting. And that can happen only when you are using authentic and genuine references for the content which you are offering to your users. And finally, you have to win the trust of your audience. it can happen only when you have worked on the previous factors.

UX & Technical SEO

Since web is becoming more user-centric, it has become really important for the marketers to make sure that they have the ability to entertain users well. In this scenario, it is worth talking about the user experience, or UX.

User experience is not just about the design elements and nice themes, even though they are highly important. User experience is mainly about making the site good for consumption in a holistic manner. It also involves the way your website’s navigation works. The response of your site is also a part of user experience. And at a reasonable extent, the content that you create is also a part of the user experience.

Moreover, you have to make sure that you have worked well on the technical SEO of your site. as a matter of fact, technical SEO involves many factors which can help in improving user experience of your site.

Mobile SEO

Most of the people now interact with the web using their smartphones and mobile devices. And so, it shouldn’t be a surprise for you that you need to work on mobile SEO if you want to do well in 2020. While this SEO is almost the same as regular SEO, it emphasizes on the efforts to improve web experience for the mobile users.

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Some Roadblocks to Link Building Success and Ways to Avoid Them

Link building can be highly beneficial for the website if done right. As a matter of fact, links hold importance for the SEO more than any other thing. This is the reason that it needs to be a part of overall SEO strategy.

One thing that you need to keep in mind about link building is that it requires commitment because it takes time to deliver results. Moreover, you have to make sure that you have planned the link building strategy well.

In this article, we are going to talk about common roadblocks that can make your journey to link building success quite a struggling one. We will also talk about the ways to avoid them.

Not paying attention to the quality assets

Many people do not pay attention to quality assets on their sites. One of the assets to talk about is the high quality content that you need to create. High quality content helps you get more readers coming to your site. And so, you are going to have better chance at reaching and engaging key targets and strengthening your authority in the eyes of Google and users.

When it comes to creating content, one of the ideas is to create content for influencers and experts. Influencing the influencers can help you reach a wider domain of people without any major struggle.

Another way is to create content based on research, data and statistics. This type of content has been noticed outperforming other types of content.

Lack of on-site optimization

It has been noticed that many people pay attention to the off-page optimization (i.e. link building) more than on-site optimization. Remember, link building can be quite powerful if you pay attention to the on-site optimization. Bad shape of the website will only cause users abandoning your site before performing any action on your site.

On-page elements that you need to take into consideration here mainly include site and URL structure, desktop and mobile experience, page loading speed, redirects, broken pages and links, optimized page tagging elements, internal link building, and much more.

Insufficient research

It seems great getting links from Forbes, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and so on. But if you are focusing only on this aspect of link building, you are actually looking for shortcuts. The mindset required for link building should be based on a purpose of getting short and long term benefits from links.

In this scenario, you need to start with the competitive analysis. You need to see where your competitors are getting links from. And you also have to see the publications which are linking to your competitors’ sites. You will need to see what tactics they are following. And most importantly, you will have to analyze if any of those practices are applicable in your case.

Another aspect of research is the keyword research. That’s where you are actually looking at what users are searching for. The methods used in keyword research for on-page optimization are well-known. You are going to have to apply same methods to see what your audience wants to see; and then use this data to get links.

Poor tracking and automation

Link building is not game to just make the links and watch the traffic coming in. you are going to have to do effective organization to make sure that you are getting results.For this purpose, you need to maintain and organize data about the link building opportunities as well as information about the traffic which you are already getting from the existing links.

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Tips to Use Podcasts for Link Building

Podcasts had been living in the world of obscurity less than a decade ago but it has become one of the fastest growing marketing mediums. The reason is that it allows people to listen to the content they want to consume. But for marketers, podcasts are not just the audio files their audiences would listen to. It has actually become a medium that can gather links – thus benefitting the SEO in general.

The first reason is that podcasts can persuade people to search for a person or brand. This branded search can be quite beneficial for the website being searched. And so, Google tends to improve the ranking of that site based on this organic search activity.

Another reason is that podcasts are now available outside the major platforms such as iTunes and Stitcher.

Whether you are having a podcast or you are a guest in one, you can use your presence in that audio in favor of your organic search ranking by earning some valuable links.

Hosting your own podcast

If you want to build a loyal audience, you can host a podcast. Moreover, it can be an effective way to develop relationships with the people in your industry.

In this article, we are not going to talk about how to start a podcast. Our main focus is to talk about the ways to earn links through podcast. For this purpose, you have to do the research about the topic people would want to listen to.And that could mean no branding at all in the first few podcasts.

If you think that you are going to do great by yourself, you can go with a monologue format in the podcast. Otherwise, interviewing others is a practically beneficial way to earn a name.

No matter what format you are going with, you have to make sure that you are going with the original and valuable content. In case you are interviewing others, you can ask them to share the link of those podcasts in their websites and social circles.

Be a guest in other podcasts

You can be a guest in other podcasts to earn online reputation for your brand. And it can be a great way to earn links. This is due to the fact that your hosts are going to share your website link in their podcasts.

The main focus of podcasters is to have knowledgeable guests in their podcasts. So if you think that you have a particular skill set, unique knowledge, or an interesting opinion, you can consider showing your availability as a guest in podcasts. In this scenario, you have to make sure that you are pitching your story in such a manner that your hosts will care what you are saying.

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Some Link Building Tactics Which Should Be Avoided

Links have their importance since the inception of SEO. This is the reason that Google always seems to focus on the quality and relevance of links.

In this scenario, you may notice that Google chooses to ignore certain links. That is due to the fact that those links do not represent a true recommendation. It means that if you have placed a link on a webpage only for the purpose of promotion, you are not going to get a thumbs-up by Google and other major search engines. A genuine link signal involves linking to the webpage which is relevant to your content.

In this article, we are going to talk about the link building tactics which you actually need to avoid.

Historical data link trap

When links are placed in a piece of content, this link addition is seen as a part of overall improvement of the content. So, if you are adding links without paying attention to the content of the page, this practice is not going to be admired by Google. Therefore, you are going to have to make sure that you are adding links in an existing web page only after improving your content according to the user requirements.

EDU Discount Link Building

In the past, there may have been a loophole which allowed people to get instant traffic to rank their pages by building links in EDU web pages. But now, this practice is blacklisted; and so, you are going to get penalized if you are still building links this way. Google has made consistent algorithmic changes in the previous years, and building links through this tactic is a clear violation of Google’s guidelines.

Content Marketing Links

No, we are not talking about guest posting. There are a lot of ways you can do content marketing. One of the major ways is to establish a site by adding content in it on a regular basis. Another way of content marketing involves hiring a writer who writes the articles and publishes on third party websites. That is called advertising. And that is the content marketing version which has the capability to violate FTC Guidelines.

Viral link campaigns

It is important to note that viral link building can be both successful and unsuccessful depending on the ways it is executed. The good kind of link campaigns mainly involves driving users to the pages which can be beneficial for them. In this scenario, the link campaigns may involve less link creation and more awareness building.

On the other hand, an off-topic link campaign is less likely to deliver results. The reason is that it tends to have no value for the users because it is not created for the purpose of bringing any kind of awareness.

Sponsor links

If you think a bit realistically, you will see that links generated from a philanthropic event are not going to be quite meaningful. This kind of link building is pretty similar to the viral link campaign which doesn’t produce results. If you really want to explain something in a webpage through link building to the users, you are going to have to find another page within your site to further explain what you are writing.This organic link building will not bring quick traffic to your site but it works in the long term.

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Getting High Quality Links Using Social Profiles

The concept of getting inks using profiles on several social and discussion platforms is fairly old. But the way this technique has been used has made it a spam practice. But the matter of fact is that there is a genuine way social profiles can be used to get high quality links.

The first thing that you are going to have to do is to make sure that you have a real profile about you as the person representing the business you want to promote. You are going to have to make efforts in building connection with the other businesses that may have the tendency to link with you.

There are a few ways you can use profiles to get links.

Use executive’s profile to get better response

Connections need to be established between real persons when it comes to business promotion. This way, you will be able to build trustworthiness of your business.

However, the major problem is that many of the users have learned the way to ignore messages from brands because there are many brands trying to convince users to buy from them.

In this scenario, you have to make sure that you are making personal connections.In order tobuild trust, marketing teams ask company’s executives to create business profiles on social and discussion platforms. These profiles are managed by the marketing teams. They log into the profile and try to connect with the audience.

The benefits of forum profiles

Social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn are very common and, so, quite popular for the typical social activity over internet. But there are more niche networks and forums that allow people belonging to certain industries or niches to connect with each other.

In such forums and platforms, you are going to find that people ask questions which have more depth. That’s where you can find better opportunity to build better connections. Another advantage of such platforms is that you can find great ideas about the content for your website.

Using LinkedIn to share content with right people

A LinkedIn profile of your company’s executive can be the best tool of promoting the content that you want to share with the audience. Of course you are doing everything with the permission from your executive. You can share schedules to let the people know about the latest piece of content that you are going to share.

Reaching out to the profiles of people who are authorities

You can also use general platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and certain forums to perform an outreach and build interest for your content.

For instance, you can follow the profiles of people in authority over Twitter. You are going to have to take the first step in building relationship with the people working behind those Twitter handles. This effort in building interaction can be both direct and indirect. For instance, you can address those people directly in your tweets or you can simple use their profile handles in order to mention them in your tweets. That is the best way to get noticed and have their responses.

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Best YouTube & Video Optimization Tools to Bring Your Videos Views

YouTube has become a leading and most powerful social media platform out there. Every day, people spend billions of hours on YouTube. So, it should not come as a surprise that YouTube marketing has become one of the leading ways to get your brand promoted in the world.

In this scenario, it is nothing less than a challenge for the marketers to make sure that their videos do not get lost in the millions of videos uploaded every day.There are certain tools and methods that can help your videos stand out.

Keyword Tool

It is the initial requirement to make sure that your videos are watched by right audiences.  And so, you have to invest your time in finding out what your audience likes to search. You will be able to know about the search phrases which your audience uses to search for the content.

Keyword Tool can be quite helpful here. It can help you find the keywords from YouTube autocomplete database. You have to enter a keyword and it will show you several suggestions related to that keyword.

Camtasia

You may sometimes need to include screen recordings in your videos. You are going to need to do it when you are creating how-to’s, demos, or tutorial videos. If you are using a smartphone or camera to record what is happening on your screen, it will look unprofessional.

You can do screen recordings with the help of a tool known as Camtasia which also allows you to record your mouse movements and keystrokes.

You can edit your recordings later to add effects, notes and several annotations.

Canva

The first thing that appears along with the title of the video is video’s thumbnail. In most of the times, people look at the thumbnail to decide whether or not they need to see the video. Therefore, it is very important to create professional, high quality and relevant thumbnails for the videos to attract viewers.

And easy to use and efficient design tool that you can use to create high quality thumbnails is Canva. Except for a few features which you are going to have to pay for, Canva is mostly free.

TubeBuddy

When you own a channel, you have to make sure that you have a nice system in place to view the user comments and reply to them as soon as you can. This way, you can increase engagement with your audience.

However, viewing and replying to them manually is going to be very difficult due to obvious reasons. so you can take help from a tool known as TubeBuddy. It is basically an extension that allows you to manage your YouTube channel without having to switch between the tabs.

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The Concept of Image Link Building

The idea of using visual content to earn more links is amazing. We all know how powerful the images can be. They have the capability to captivate your audience. But using this visual content to earn links is the best thing that you can do. In literal meaning, I am talking about link building through images.

We all know that Google has been paying lot of attention on the user experience. And the bigger part of this user experience is based on videos and images. If you are getting this point, it will not be difficult for you to understand that it is the need of the hour to modify your approach in order to present your website’s information to Google and other major search engines.

Now, you may wonder how you can use images to building links. Well, there are some ways you can do it. It is basically about the types of content that you can use to building links. A quick run-down of the key types of visual content may be useful here.

Infographics

The infographics have become so popular that they sometime seem to be overused; and this is what many people think. But the matter of fact is that eye-catching infographics can be quite helpful to prompt the users understand your point. And that is the very reason that they never stop helping publishers in building links.

Appropriate use of logo

While you may be thinking how a brand logo can be useful for the users. But the matter of fact is that it is a visual content;and also that a professionally developed logo can build a nicer image of your brand.

The logo of your website is going to be a representation when you are contributing as a guest blogger in other websites. You can associate this logo with a link back to your website’s main page.

Product photos or a brand photo-shoot

If you are an e-commerce business, you can use the product images for link building. Make sure that you are using high quality images only. Moreover, you are going to have to optimize each of your images for SEO.

If you do not have products to take the photos of, you can consider having a brand photo-shoot. For this purpose, you can get services of a professional photographer. The brand photo-shoot can include the photos of you working on your computer or sitting on the office desk.

Statistical charts, graphs and maps

Depending on your business, you can take help from data visualization, charts, graphs and maps to build links. For this purpose, you are going to have to a little research to pull the statistics about your business and the products and services that you are selling. Make sure that the information you are using for the development of graphs and other visualizations is easy to understand.

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Difference between SEO, SEM and PPC

The concept of SEM (search engine marketing) started in 2001. This concept would include both paid and non-paid methods of marketing the content to get it ranked in search engines. Using this definition, we can say that both PPC and SEO fall under the SEM term.

In other words, you can consider SEM as a category of marketing through search engine. PPC and SEO are the parts of hierarchy beneath the SEM main category. And this definition makes sense.

Although the above statements about SEM make sense, SEM seemed to fit in the paid search sphere more than SEO; and it continues to do so. In this scenario, it may be worth describing the difference between PPC, SEO and SEM.

Difference between SEM and PPC

The simple thing that you are going to have to keep in mind here is that PPC is SEM. In other words, PPC is same as SEM or at least a major part of it.And SEO is none of those things.

This is mainly due to the evolution of potentially confusing acronyms as well the need to put a major emphasis on the importance of paid search. Whatever the reason is, the end result that we have got is that two cost driven marketing terms have now started to mean the same thing.

Sadly, if you are the one enthusiastic enough to get a sense based on the literal meanings, these two terms are going to confuse you further. Now, there is no doubt about what PPC means. It may be called CPC, paid search, or search ads. It is clear that it is referring to the paid search marketing through the search engines such as Google and Bing.

Difference between SEO and PPC

We all know SEO is search engine optimization. But if you look at the words in a literal perspective, you are going to see that these words do not make sense. I mean, how can you optimize an entire search engine? No, you are not going to do that. Search engine optimization is the set of strategies and tactics that help us in optimizing content and websites for search engines. The purpose is to make sure that they are better able to address the masses.

As mentioned above, PPC marketing is the same as or a bigger part of SEM. The factors that make both of these similar are mentioned below.

  • Both are paid
  • Both need budget allocation
  • Both help search engines and other major marketing platforms earn a lot of money.

If you look at the basic definition of SEM, you will find it saying, “a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising.”

From this definition, you may call SEO and SEM the same; but they are actually not.

SEO and SEM are not the same

The reason for this is mentioned above. With PPC being the same as a bigger part of the SEM, there is not much room left for the SEO to be a part of this scheme. Both PPC and SEM are paid initiatives. It means that they have everything to do with the advertisers who are ready to spend money. On the other hand, the concept of SEO is entirely different even though it tends to do the same thing which the PPC and SEM pull off.

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What to Do If Google Ranks Wrong Pages for Your Keywords

It is nothing less than good news for you to know that the page that you wanted to rank is being ranked by Google. And it is surely going to be a bad news if you find out that the page you wanted to rank is not what Google wants to rank.

No matter what the reason is, the traffic is not going where you want it to go. It means that you might not get the conversions, which is the major goal of any SEO strategy.

This problem is not new and the good news is that it can be fixed. There are a few steps that you need to consider in this regard.

Evaluation of user intent

You may have heard about user intent in the past. It is basically the goal a person has while typing in the search field of Google.

Over the past few years, it has become highly important for a page to match the search query which has been entered by user with intent. The user intent may be related to a goal to buy something, a goal to find a particular website or page, or a goal to find helpful information about a certain topic.

Make sure that your content is tailored to the content.

Evaluation of content on the page

After you have ensured that your content is matching the intent, you have to make sure that the content on the relevant page is fully optimized. A few things that you are going to have to focus include:

  • Presence of primary focus keyword in the page title
  • Reference to primary focus keywords in description
  • Length of the copy as compared to those in the top ranking pages
  • Use of semantic keywords by competitors
  • The ability of your page to answer the queries

Evaluation of internal links

The Google terms a page important that has more pages linking to it. Therefore, you are going to have to make sure that more pages are linking page to the page which you want ranked. About 3 – 5 topically relevant pages in your site need to link back to the page that you want to rank.

Evaluation of external links

This step is similar to the above one. You are going to have to make sure that multiple high quality sites are pointing at the page that you want to rank. While internal linking is not difficult at all, you are going to have to make a strategy to make sure that you are getting high quality links from the other sites.